Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Channeling the Minutemen

There's always been a kind of Bizarro World quality to Fox News -- you know, up is down, right is wrong, true is false -- which no doubt contributes to its role as a font of Newspeak.

But on a recent Fox News Watch broadcast, James Pinkerton raised the art to a new zenith as he painted a picture of poor, put-upon Minutemen being negatively portrayed by the media:

PINKERTON: The media like brown people, but they like black people more. And so, therefore, the -- when Jesse Jackson and his -- some of these people are starting to worry about immigrants cutting away jobs from African Americans, that's one thing. But what they really dislike, of course, is white people. And so --

HALL: Oh, Jim. Oh, please. Please.

PINKERTON: -- in that sense, the -- the racial typology -- brown, black, white -- was visible there, and I think --

[crosstalk]

PINKERTON: I stand by it completely, in terms of the way the Minutemen were covered on this coverage. And anybody can watch --

GABLER: The Minutemen got a favorable article on the front page of The New York Times.

PINKERTON: The Minutemen get slammed --

[crosstalk]

Well, it's hard to tell what Pinkerton meant by "this coverage" exactly. But if he was talking about Fox News' coverage of the Minutemen, then he appears to be ingesting powering hallucinogens before watching. Maybe Ibogaine, or something like that.

Because really, Fox News' handling of the Minutemen has been so pronouncedly biased in their favor that it's nearly impossible to find any negative coverage there.

Then there's Bill O'Reilly, who likewise promotes the Minutemen as a group of sincere citizens. And in general, the coverage on Fox uniformly is indistinguishable from Minuteman propaganda.

It's not, however, simply on Fox that this is the case. CNN, particularly under the leadership of Lou Dobbs -- who openly avowed his explicit support -- has done perhaps as much as Fox to promote the notion of Minutemen.

Then there's MSNBC, which has been not quite so ardent but certainly as largely favorable in their coverage of the Minutemen. Tucker Carlson has been their most fervent defender, calling them people "who have taken up arms for the land they love," and had a softball interview with cofounder Jim Gilchrist. Joe Scarborough hosted Simcox for an interview that did bring up the issues of extremism and racism in the Minutemen's ranks, but largely took Simcox's denials at face value. And on Hardball with Norah O'Donnell, a Minuteman spokesman appeared as a "conservative" talking head and was never asked about anything in the way of extremism.

And that's just on cable TV. Likewise, the general coverage of the Minutemen in the press has been neutral to positive, with warm write-ups in various organs.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.